John Luther Adams (b. 1953)
Introduction John Luther Adams was born in Mississippi and started his musical life as many of his generation born in the 50's, in various Rock bands as a drummer. Upon graduating from California Institute of the Arts, became an environmentalist, heavy on preservation of wildlife and found himself in Alaska in 1978, where he lived until 2014. He continued to perform as a Timpanist and percussionist with various orchestras in the 80's. Work Analysis His love of nature in general informs all of his work and feels to be in tribute to the wonders of nature as he sees it, as a miracle of creation. His concept of "sonic geography" informed one of his earliest pieces in "Songbirdsong", piccolo and percussion heavy to recreate actual birdsong. More recently in 2014 He released an album called "Become Ocean", 'which was part of a suite of works, '"''Sila: The Breath of the World"','' (the air element), following with the representation of water in '''"''Become Ocean"', (the water element),'' and the "earth element" in '''"''Inuksuit", an outdoor percussion piece.. His music, he says, is ''"our awareness of the world in which we live and the world's awareness of us" . He won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2014 for "Become Ocean" as well as the Grammy award for best Contemporary Classical Composition. Though often dismissed as new age music because of its highly suspect meditative nature, further listening to the slowly shifting sonorities of the work provide a rich tapestry of chordal shifts that echo much of what Debussy, Stravinsky and other modern composers were seeking in their early work. Comparisons As stated above, his music might be unfortunately lumped into the lazy categorization of New Age music of the type that the Windham Hill label might have produced in the 80's. One must look deeper into the motivations of his love of nature and the natural sounds and feelings that it produces, which he tries in his work to portray using traditional instrumentation. Frank Zappa was a jumping off point for his curiosity about music and began to search out composers like Varese, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, György Ligeti, and John Cage who was also a proponent of the everyday sounds of life as music, whether naturally or artificially produced. “Once I discovered that stuff, I rapidly lost interest in the backbeat and the three chords. I was still in bands, but they kept getting weirder and weirder. In the last band, a trio called Sloth, we were trying to work with open-form scores and graphic notation.” Observations Adams' music is meditative and allows for the listener to glean for themselves how it makes them feel or not feel for that matter. There is a minimalist nature to his work, but the work itself translated the gargantuan beauty and ugliness of nature as it exists. The Inuksuit piece, which was written to be played outdoors, perhaps would have been his idea to try to blend in as a human with the sound of nature, (though percussion heavy, would more than likely have disturbed the natural surroundings, but perhaps that was the secret point of it considering his environmentalism and the fact humans tend to see nature as a means to subsist on instead of protect). Works Cited http://johnlutheradams.net/biography/ http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/leaving-alaska http://www.allmusic.com/artist/john-luther-adams-mn0001763226/biography http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/song-of-the-earth